Identify customers automatically

Omnichannel for Customer Service offers a suite of capabilities that extend the power of Dynamics 365 Customer Service Enterprise to enable organizations to instantly connect and engage with their customers across digital messaging channels. An additional license is required to access Omnichannel for Customer Service. For more information, see the Dynamics 365 Customer Service pricing overview and Dynamics 365 Customer Service pricing plan pages.

You can assist customers better if you can automatically identify them and view their account and case details on the Customer summary page. One of the ways is by setting up pre-conversation questions in the relevant chat widgets. Customer responses can be used to search for details in the records and display the results. For an account or contact, the search is performed on the Name, Email, or Phone Number fields. For an account, the Phone Number pertains to the Phone field of the Account Summary page; for a contact, the Phone Number pertains to the Mobile Number field of the Contact Summary page. For cases, the search is performed on the Case Number field.

For every incoming conversation request that an agent receives, a notification appears that includes contextual information for the request and customer details, if available. After the agent accepts the incoming notification, the Customer summary page opens and shows the details of the identified customer and case. If the identified contact or account has one active case linked to it, then case will be automatically linked to the conversation. If the customer has reached out for a different case, the agent can manually change the linked case.

If more than one account, contact, or case is identified, the record won't be linked to the conversation. More information: View Customer summary for an incoming engagement request

Set up pre-conversation questions

Use the following question names to create pre-conversation questions. To know how to create pre-conversation questions and use them in a pre-conversation survey, see Configure a pre-conversation survey.

Entity	Mapping	Answer type
Account	Question context key: Name Attribute logical name: name Question context key: Email Attribute logical name: emailaddress1 Question context key: Phone Attribute logical name: telephone1 (Phone field on the Account Summary page)	Single line
Contact	Question context key: Name Attribute logical name: fullname Question context key: Email Attribute logical name: emailaddress1 Question context key: Phone Attribute logical name: telephone1 (Mobile Phone field on the Contact Summary page)	Single line
Incident	Question context key: CaseNumber Attribute logical name: ticketnumber	Single line

Note

If you'd like other fields to be recognized for phone number lookup, contact Microsoft Support.

Use the setContextProvider API method

You can automatically identify records using custom context set using the setContextProvider API apart from pre-conversation answers. To programmatically set these values, see Manage custom context.

Link customer and case to conversations when bot escalates or ends conversations

When a bot ends a customer conversation, the bot can link the case number to the conversation. The bot can create a new case number or obtain an existing one from the customer based on the customer name, email address, or telephone number.

If the bot needs to escalate the conversation to a human agent, then bot can link the customer and case number to the conversation so that when the human agent accepts the escalation request, all relevant information is available to the agent in the customer summary section. The escalation summary gives the human agent the background information about the escalation and enables quicker resolution of the customer issue.

To link the customer or case, set the values for the associated attributes, such as customer name and phone number. These attributes will be searched in the corresponding entities such as customer and case, and the result will be linked to the conversation if a single matching record is found. The bot will need to set context parameters for the following that are also set when the customer is automatically identified when the conversation is transferred.

Entity to be linked	Variable name to be set by bot	Attribute for Dynamics 365 entity to match with corresponding variable name in bot
Account	Name Email Phone	name emailaddress1 telephone1
Contact	Name Email Phone	name emailaddress1 telephone1
Case	CaseNumber	ticketnumber

For information about creating context variables for Azure and Power Virtual Agents bots, see Configure context variables for the bot.

See also

Create and manage workstreams
Configure a Power Virtual Agents bot
Configure Azure bot
Context variables for bots